or having a hand in the routine goings-on of our daily lives. (Again, I would not be so arrogant as to say there can't be a supreme being; but it takes only logical sense, not arrogance, to know that the biblical God could not exist.)

Okay. Did you view the photos on that site? Do you still think there’s an all-wise, all-loving, all-powerful deity who cares about each and every human being as his very own child? View the photos again, this time through God’s eyes. Imagine each and every person you see is your own child. Are you filled with unspeakable rage? Common sense says there would have to be something seriously wrong with a god who can speak entire universes into existence but over the course of thousands of years still can’t manage this havoc that the creatures he claims to dearly love endure. If there were even the slightest hint of a reasonable reason why his hands are tied, then perhaps we could give him a few weeks, or months, or millennia to get it together. But there is no such hint. Now if you are at this instant beginning to make excuses on God’s behalf, such as suggesting he has a good reason for watching the slaughter all these people so horribly for so many thousands of years, then I have a question. If we’re not supposed to use our common sense in questioning the existence of such a deity and his behavior, then why does he require us to understand stuff in order to be saved? And why the brain?

But there is even more to think about, in considering whether the Christian God is real or fiction. Think for a moment of all the things we’re told made God really angry, and how he reacted. He struck people dead just for insulting him. He struck Ananias and Saphira dead just for lying about fudging on their offering pledge. He killed Uzzah just for his reflex action to catch the Ark of the Covenant when it started to fall—people weren’t supposed to touch the Ark. There are many similar examples of things that made God mad, and how he got even with a vengeance. He cursed a tree for not having fruit when he was hungry. He had a couple of bears kill 42 little kids for making fun of a bald preacher. He demanded that those who didn’t worship him like a god be brought to him and slaughtered while he watched.

Now, with that in mind, please view this 3.5-minute video before reading on. It’s an excerpt from the iconic Mondo Cane film series of the 1960s. But please go and get yourself a cup of tea for a few minutes first, while this high-resolution video continues to load—until the light gray buffering bar gets at least 3/4 of the way across—then click the little play button. (Watch it before reading on, because references are made to what you see in the video.)

                                                                 

So the God who changes not, and who is the same “yesterday, today and tomorrow,” gets really pissed at a lot of relatively petty things, loses his temper and kills individuals at the drop of a pin, but somehow isn’t bothered enough by the torture of these little kids to strike dead the men who did it—or Hitler or warmongers or serial killers and others since biblical times. A couple who doesn’t live up to their offering pledge get struck dead, yet these bad guys live. How can this be explained?

No complicated explanation is required. Isn’t it obvious that this God is just as fictional as all the others? Back then, he micro-managed, visibly, “in-your-face.” Now he’s absolutely gone—never to be seen or heard from again (except as believers attribute things to him in their own minds). When he did micro-manage, his behaviors were exactly like all the other jealous, vengeful gods that were created by humans in those days, and written about in ancient texts. The Christian God behaved just like the others because that’s what we created our gods to be in those days. And he “no longer” behaves like that because he was fiction then and is fiction still.

Christians claim the record isn’t fiction, even as they admit they can’t explain why the God who never changes changed. They want to keep on believing they’ll get to live trillions of years and see all their dead friends and loved ones again. They want a spelled-out paradigm for believing their lives aren’t random and insignificant in this vast universe. So they find ways to keep the fantasy intact—they make excuses for God: “Well,” they say, “God is mysterious! Surely that torture was for the little black kids’ own good! Surely the hundreds who got their hands and feet cut off in Sierra Leone are better off without them! No doubt every cruel act of man’s inhumanity to man is a good thing for each victim—or at least for each believing victim—because all things, no matter how horrific, work together for good! God knows what’s best for us! It is a sin to question God’s motives or his existence on the basis of these apparent contradictions and absurdities.” We are asked to believe that all the bad things that happened to Job were really good things. Maybe if his entire family hadn’t been slaughtered, he wouldn’t have stayed faithful to the mean God and gone to heaven. And his slaughtered relatives? Oh, it was good for them too. Maybe if they hadn’t been slaughtered, they’d have strayed from God in later years and missed heaven. There’s no end to the bizarre rationales used to avoid reality. Who knows the reason why this God of the Old Testament isn’t so touchy anymore? But hey, it must be a good one!

Meanwhile those of us who prefer reality are asking the question Christians deem unfair to ask, about the torture of those children, and other atrocities: Where was God? Christians have conditioned us to just dismiss the question as irrelevant—or even blasphemous. (They would never consider it irrelevant with respect to anybody else’s god!) But for all God’s talk about being with his followers at all times to comfort and sustain them, to protect them, to give them anything they ask for, it is indeed fair to ask why he doesn’t come through at the very time he’s needed most. The rest of us see the contradictions, which are both countless and enormous. The vindictive behaviors of the Christian God, together with his inexplicable failure to show up where the rubber meets the road, prove he is no exception in a sea of false gods. If Zeus happened to be the god in the hot seat at the moment, Christians would be quick to discredit him, using as proof the very reasons they're unwilling to consider with respect to their own God.

Despite reason, millions of humans—I once among them—still imagine this wrathful deity of the biblical text to exist. Millions still believe he’ll fix it so they can live trillions and trillions of billions of trillions of years, if only they believe he exists, and that he actually has those secret reparative powers that he’s not yet been pleased to use on our behalf—or, on the other hand, be tortured in sheer agony for trillions and trillions of years if it all just doesn't seem quite plausible to their feeble human minds.

Incidentally, a sort of "compromise belief" would be deism. Our country's founding fathers [USA] were more deist than anything else. Thus, contrary to what Christians often claim, this country was not even founded by Christian people, particularly, much less built on a Christian foundation. Deists do believe in God—but not in the biblical account; thus they are not Christian.

To summarize so far, the God of the Old Testament, who "changes not," was a real piece of work! But to admit the obvious is to cast doubt on the holy text, rendering the very source of the religion's “revelation” inauthentic.

You know what it's like to be an atheist

If you’re a Christian, you're an atheist yourself, to a large degree, in the sense that you do not believe in most of the gods of the ages. You don't believe in the existence of Zeus or Poseidon or Vishnu, nor in the divine insight of Mohammed or the Virgin Goddess in Nepal. Most of you do not believe in the divine revelations of Joseph Smith, Ellen White or Mary Baker Eddy. You do not believe in the various other "mystery religions" out of which Christianity sprang. You do not believe in Mithraism, for example. No doubt you think all of those are silly, as do I.

Neither of us sees any evidence that the claims of those religions and their gods are true—even as hundreds of millions of other sincere people DO see evidence that they are true, and believe in them as sincerely as you believe in yours!  Truth is, most humans simply latch onto whatever they grew up with—and then spend their lives defending it as an adult choice made on the basis of evidence. Each sees it as a mere coincidence, albeit a convenient one, that they just happened to be born into the true religion! Christians who are "non-believers" toward other religions are aghast that those millions of others could believe what they believe. And that's exactly how those millions of others see Christianity and the God that goes with it. Maybe these hundreds of millions of people on both sides would do well to ask of themselves—sincerely—what they ask of others: How can you possibly buy that?

The many “counterfeits” prove one is genuine?

So, if you are a Christian, we are both largely atheist in the sense that we feel the same about all religions and gods except one. We part company only in that you feel one of them is true and all the others are “counterfeits,” proactively created by the "bad god" of your religion (Satan) specifically to distract people from the true one. It’s all a deliberate tactic in the ubiquitous war between the good god and the bad god, you say.

I can’t think of a better answer than that—the “counterfeit” argument—to such an embarrassing position. I mean, Christians have to say something in response to their religion being so much like the false ones. But because it is, it should not be so shocking that some of us see no evidence that it, the one which ultimately thrived, is an exception to the rule. Christianity’s God is as jealous and wrathful as the others. It requires a blood sacrifice for the appeasement of its deity like the others. Its believers will be rewarded with immortality while everyone else will be punished with endless torture, like the others. Seems to me that if this is a “real vs. counterfeit” situation, there must exist a way to distinguish the real from the fake. If the genuine article cannot stand out when compared side by side with the fakes, then they are all the same.

So does Christianity really stand out?

It’s easy to think of plenty of ways it could. For example, the deity could actually show up now and then. Why in heaven's name wouldn’t he, given all the fakery? The ancient text claims he used to, all the time. Why not now? Especially why not now when it’s perfectly logical and understandable to doubt those prior claims—and still more especially when all the other religions were saying the same! If the notion is that God showed us once and doesn’t have to show us again, well that sounds more like a disgruntled human than the most powerful being in the universe, who cares for nothing more than rescuing and pampering the creatures he personally created and dearly loves.

I don’t have the wisdom of a god, but common sense tells me that if I love and care for my kids more than anything else in the world, I’ll nurture them in every conceivable way—not drop them a few treasure-hunt clues and see who’s got brains enough, stamina enough and will power enough to get a life-and-death matter right! I’d be right there with them, every step of the way, with whatever was necessary to help them understand. If they were dull-witted, or even sassy and disobedient, the last thing I’d want to do is play some kind of cat and mouse game, saying I gave them enough clues already and whoever doesn’t get it will just have to die. Correction: ...will just have to be brutally tortured forever.

But millions of people have no problem with God’s elusiveness. They still believe there’s a supernatural being out there waiting to give them either torture or a jackpot, depending on how they respond to his communiques that are in the form of mental impressions. They say God doesn't have to show up for real, because these mental impressions are real enough. They're obviously not real enough for the billions of non-believers—and not adequate enough to get their attention.

Being a non-theist doesn’t make you bad....

It just means you don’t believe in gods, angels, demons and ghosts—holy or otherwise. Atheists are just as "spiritual" (or not) as anybody else. They care about right and wrong, ethics, poverty, hunger, education, etc., the same as everybody else. Or not. People who immerse themselves in the supernatural have no corner on these values, though Christians are fond of the notion that scruples are available only from supernatural beings—theirs in particular. If you didn’t learn the difference between right and wrong from the Christian deity, then you haven’t learned it, and will burn in hell! But of course it does not take a supernatural friend, real or imagined, to know the difference between right and wrong. Various philosophies of life exist besides religious ones, which put a high value on right living. And besides, good deeds just for the sake of goodness are surely of greater quality than those springing from a religious agenda of getting a reward or avoiding torture.

(Christians say they are good because of their love and appreciation of God, not to gain a reward or avoid torture. This is silly. If you grew up with a  (resume here).

I remember the first time I shared with anyone that I’d outgrown my childhood religion and moved on to a higher plane of spirituality. I was having dinner with Bill and Gordon at Leona’s Pizzeria. When I told them, they warmly congratulated me, as innocently and sincerely as they would if I’d gotten a promotion or graduated. I was impressed! And I felt I had graduated. The mind set of people who prefer to keep their feet on the ground is very different from those who listen for messages from the supernatural world. When you are not constantly preoccupied with trying to perceive cryptic mental impressions from a deity, to determine what course of action would please him, you are more free to take charge of your own life and just live it. Basing decisions on reality saves a lot of time and headache.

God's Will?

And besides, living according to “God’s will” isn’t exactly what it’s billed to be. No matter how much a believer prays or concentrates, it is still always the believer’s own decision as to what will be taken as communication from the deity, and thus always still the believer’s own decision as to what the deity wants. In other words, the human decides what God is saying his will is! Presumably that’s based on the believer’s own honest assessment of what the best course of action would be—which is the very same way atheists and Mormons and iron workers make decisions. If believers were really receiving wisdom actually dispensed by the gods,

Christianity...

by Larry Hallock

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